Learning About Collaborative Governance

Archive for September 2009

I’ve been following some excellent posts about resistance to change initiatives, such as those at Holger Naumeier’s Change Management Blog and Jack Vinson’s Knowledge Jolt with Jack. The context of these discussions is organizational change management, but there are interesting parallels with the field of public policy consensus building. Change is a key dimension of […]

The Future Search Conference is one of several collaborative planning methods that take a “whole system” approach. These processes try to replace shelf-bound plans with agendas for action that are developed collaboratively in the course of intensive large-group meetings. Key Concepts To do this, Future Search insists on the basic starting principle: “Get the whole […]

Video courtesy of Web 2.0 ExpoSF-’09 and O’Reilly Media. Peter Koht of the City of Santa Cruz, CA, describes the city’s online method for gathering public ideas about how to handle a severe budget crisis. The platform is uservoice. Similar to the IdeaScale system used in the White House Open Government Initiative, it allows users […]

Many who spend their time trying to find agreement among adversaries have long been familiar with the work of John Forester. A professor of planning at Cornell, he’s always followed his own path directly into the realities of facilitative practice rather than the intricacies of theory. Dealing with Differences: Dramas of Mediating Public Disputes is […]

Taking It Upstream, A Green Leadership (Un)Conference, is coming up soon on September 25 at Pepperdine University’s Malibu Campus. Devoted to climate change issues, the one-day event will challenge the usual conference format by engaging participants in a variety of collaborative techniques. As its website summarizes: On September 25, 2009, the third anniversary of AB […]

Leaders and managers who convene consensus building groups are often frustrated by the difficulty of one of the first steps: defining the problem the group is trying to resolve. Despite a stated desire to collaborate, many participants don’t really understand what the term means and may arrive at the table in anything but a collaborative […]

About Cross Collaborate

Cross Collaborate is a resource to help build capacity in public policy collaboration. We offer practical information about collaborative methods for all those involved in shaping and influencing government decisions and policies.Read more on our offerings and approach on the About page.